Gilbert Juma Deya was a Kenyan-born evangelist who built an international following in Britain and Africa on claims that he could cure infertility through prayer. He was born in poverty in 1952 in a town outside Nairobi. He left primary school due to financial difficulty and bullying, and as a child engaged in begging and petty theft. After working as a porter in Uganda and a security guard in Kisumu, he entered Christian ministry.
At 21 he married Mary Anyango, with whom he eventually had 15 children. In 1976 he founded the Salvation of Jesus Christ Church and was later ordained by the United Evangelical Church of Kenya, taking the title “archbishop.” He gained wider recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s through televised faith-healing services at Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Conference Centre.
Deya moved to the UK in the mid-1990s and formally registered Gilbert Deya Ministries as a London-based charity in 1997. The organization expanded across major British cities and into mainland Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, at its peak claiming more than 30,000 UK members. Deya accumulated substantial personal wealth while promotional materials emphasized his ties to prominent political figures and the British royal family.
The ministry’s central teaching was that Deya’s supernatural powers let infertile and post-menopausal women conceive through prayer alone, producing “miracle babies” without intercourse. He extended this theology by framing conditions like AIDS as spiritual curses and infertility as the result of generational curses his ministry could lift. The organization centered on Deya’s unquestioned authority: members were discouraged from using mainstream healthcare, required to tithe 10% of their income, and subjected to intense pressure, including threats of divine punishment, damnation, and demonic curses used to silence dissent and deter outside scrutiny from journalists and doctors.
The “miracle babies” scheme began surfacing after British female followers traveled to unlicensed Nairobi clinics run by Deya’s wife, Mary, to give birth. In 2004, a British doctor alerted authorities after an unusual birth, prompting a UK High Court investigation that found a ministry member had been physically assaulted to simulate labor and then handed a child taken from another family. The judge concluded the birth had been fabricated for financial motives. Later that year, ministry members publicly presented 11 children as “miracle babies,” triggering raids by Nairobi police, who recovered around 20 infants from ministry-linked households. DNA testing showed none were biologically related to the women claiming to be their mothers.
Investigators traced many infants to abductions from Pumwani Maternity Hospital, targeting vulnerable mothers in low-income areas. Mary Deya and several associates were arrested, and a former pastor within the movement publicly confessed the births had been staged as part of a coordinated scheme.
Deya remained in Britain, resisting extradition and attacking medical bodies, the Church of England, and critical journalists as evil and devil-worshipping. In 2006, London police arrested him under a Kenyan extradition warrant, launching years of legal battles in which he argued extradition would expose him to torture. Throughout, Gilbert Deya Ministries kept operating and raising millions of pounds, while facing repeated Charity Commission investigations into financial irregularities, safeguarding concerns and the sale of “medicinal” olive oil.
Extradition remained stalled as, in Kenya, Mary Deya was convicted in 2011 of stealing a baby and imprisoned. Deya later divorced her, blaming her for damaging his reputation. Legal delays left some recovered infants in institutional care in Nairobi for over a decade, unable to be adopted while the criminal case remained open. Deya also faced separate sexual assault charges in Britain, of which he was acquitted in 2014. His UK appeals were exhausted in 2017, and he was extradited to Kenya that August to face child-theft charges.
The case moved slowly through Kenyan courts until June 2023, when a Nairobi magistrate acquitted Deya, ruling prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence of his direct involvement in the abductions. He resumed religious outreach in East Africa afterward. On June 17, 2025, he died at age 73 in a vehicle accident near Kisumu.
Key Sources:
BBC News. (2004, August 13). Pregnant by Jesus?
Rambaya, S. (2004, August 20). A slice of Gilbert Deya. The East African Standard.
Rukanga, B. (2025, June 18). Gilbert Deya: Kenyan “miracle babies” pastor dies in road crash. BBC News.
Supple, E. (2017, January 25). The “miracle babies” preacher tying British regulators in knots. The New Humanitarian.
Wandera, V. (2023, July 17). Kenyan court acquits ‘miracle baby’ televangelist of trafficking. Al Jazeera.